In the days after President Donald Trump was widely criticized for downplaying the severity of the coronavirus pandemic (“It is what it is,” he told Axios on HBO’s Jonathan Swan of the escalating daily death toll), the president returned to the “friendly confines” of Fox News, Seth Meyers pointed on Thursday’s episode of Late Night.
“They’ll let him get away with any lie, no matter how outrageous,” Meyers said of Fox News, before specifically focusing on a conversation Trump had with the hosts of Fox & Friends on Wednesday. “When the topic of the coronavirus pandemic came up—you know, the deadly plague that’s currently killing over 1,000 Americans per day—Trump repeated one of his most sociopathic lies.”
“My view is the schools should open,” Trump said in the interview. “This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away. My view is that schools should be open.”
“Is he talking about a pandemic or a summer romance?” Meyers joked, before imagining Trump as part of the cast of Grease. “Oh, you know, we’ll both go back to school. It’ll go away like things go away,” he said, impersonating the president. “But then I’ll find out you didn’t go back to Australia. But I’ll play it cool in front of the T-birds. You’ll get mad. Anyway! Open the schools”
Switching back to his normal speaking voice, Meyers added, “Seriously, stop saying stuff like that. You’ve been saying it for six months, and it’s been both wrong and dangerous. Of course, if you’re a New York City real estate crook like Trump, things really do just go away because you probably have a bunch of criminal goons around you to make them go away. Trump probably just never realized that was what was happening.”
During his lengthy interview with Fox & Friends, Trump made a number of dubious false claims about the coronavirus, at one point saying, “Most of the map is in the white color. The red color is the corona or potential and it’s a very, relatively, small portion.”
“Yeah, just ignore the red parts and we’re fine,” Meyers joked in response. “Kind of how a plane crash is a successful landing if you ignore everything besides the black box.”
Unlike how Swam fact-checked Trump in real-time during the Axios on HBO interview, Trump was not challenged by the Fox hosts, something Meyers was happy to point out.